


Hey Pixie Dream Girl, I'm Coming For Your Man!

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Bookshop Owner Betty Cooper, F/M, Meet-Cute, The one with the manic pixie dream girl, Writer Jughead Jones, bookshop au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:00:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23198224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Jughead has been fixed up with a blind date.  He's hating it.  Betty just wants to help...Betty sidled to the end of the row and peeked round the shelf, catching his eye. “Date not going so well?”“You heard that?” He was slightly flushed with embarrassment now.“Sorry, I was just there in travel so…” she didn’t want him to think she was an eavesdropping creep and get Joe Goldberg vibes from her.“Well, yeah. Of a dating history that’s pretty much all lows this is the Marianas Trench.”
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 46
Kudos: 159
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	Hey Pixie Dream Girl, I'm Coming For Your Man!

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Nathan Rabin who coined the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl in a review of Elizabethtown:
> 
> "Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example). The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." 
> 
> I reckon that if Jughead was interested in MPDGs he'd be a much less interesting character. Agree? Let me know...

Betty hated it when Archie looked at her like this. There was concern and affection in those liquid brown eyes, sure, but there was pity too. “All I’m saying Betty is that you don’t want to get to like thirty or something and realise that you’re getting older without ever having been young.”

“Arch, not everyone wants to tomcat around and have meaningless sex with random hotties. And that’s not the be-all-and-end-all of being young. I like my life. I’m perfectly content.” As she said it she was aware that there was a “but” or an ”if only” hovering somewhere but she shoved it aside and gave her friend a broad reassuring smile.

“I’m not saying it’s all about sex Betty. I’m saying you could try saying yes to things like when Cheryl offered to pay for you to go to Cabo with her and Toni. Or when Kevin asked you to be best woman at his wedding. You just say no without thinking about it. Take a risk or two, that’s all.”

“What you’re saying is that I’m a sad spinster who runs a bookshop and that I’ll die alone and be eaten by cats and no-one will mourn my passing. Thanks for that.” She was getting irritated with him as a way of making this conversation stop but she knew that he only wanted what was best for her. 

It was a complicated relationship but it worked pretty well most of the time. They’d been small town neighbours as kids and, on and off throughout their adolescence, one of them had had a crush on the other but never for long and it just never synchronised. By the time they were both twenty four and living in New York the itch had simply gone away. She thought of him like a brother and he thought of her like a cross between a sacred object and one of his guy friends. He couldn’t even imagine laying a hand on her or ever wanting to. Both needing cheap accommodation in an expensive city, they moved in together. While some of his conquests thought it was weird that his roommate was a single girl, none of them lasted long enough for it to become an issue. 

Tonight they were having drinks together at the neighbourhood bar and Arch was trying to life-coach her into having more “fun” but her idea of fun bore little relationship to his. She liked cozy pyjamas and a good novel, baking brownies and drinking wine at home. He liked raucous sports bars and evenings that you had to piece together from social media the next day. He liked women too, lots of them and rarely the same one for more than a month. He fell in love every week but fell right back out as often. She thought it must be exhausting while he thought the way she lived was boring. They mostly agreed to disagree but tonight there were no serious prospects in the bar and so he had turned his attention solely to his oldest and dearest friend. “Look I’m laying down a challenge for you. This week take one risk. Do something that surprises you. Just to see what happens.”

“Fine. It’ll be terrible and then you’ll shut up about it and leave me alone. Right?”

“Yeah, if it’s terrible I’ll shut up. Pinkie promise.” He held up his pinkie like a total dweeb and she linked hers to it and grinned at him.

Two days later Betty was sitting at the counter sipping her mint tea and reading Vonnegut when the bell above the door jangled her out of her reverie. She quickly donned her best customer service smile. A pretty doe eyed brunette girl ran in through the door tugging on the hand of a young man. “Come on Juggles. Let’s find all the copies and put them at the front of the shelves. Hey you could sign them, you’d make her lots of money that way.” She nodded towards Betty as she said that and then scampered, giggling towards the shelves like Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Scratch that, thought Betty, like a drama major auditioning for Peaseblossom. The director would give her a note to dial that shit back by about a third.

As her tinkling laugher rang back towards them from the stacks, as she no doubt intended it to, the young man looked at Betty with an expression of quiet desperation. “Oh sweet release of death come for me now. Look you must have a shotgun under the counter, in case you get robbed or something. Just shoot me. Please. It’d be such a mercy.”

“So sorry, no shotgun. Oddly bookshops don’t get held up. Another boon granted by St Jeff of Bezos. An empty cash register means I never get turned over by footpads and vagabonds.” He turned his full attention towards her at that remark and smiled. It was like having a spotlight turned on her. She realised that she was staring but couldn’t stop. The smile was stupendous.

“I like “footpad.” Germanic do you think?” He was looking at her curiously now.

“Yep, vagabond is the Latinate synonym. Both with the implication of a robber going on foot.” She was foolishly delighted when this smartassery earned her another smile. If she’d been to the Build-a-Man Workshop this is what she would have come out clutching. Start with tall, dark and handsome as your basic model. Hair a little longer than standard, blue eyes not brown, take out a little of the stuffing so he’s long and lean and slouchy. Clothes? Blue collar meets grunge with just a pinch of hipster. So there has to be a plaid, a worn T-shirt, jeans, combat boots, and finally suspenders hanging loosely at his hips. That’ll do for Betty Cooper thank you. She could stand to lose the old beanie but it was no biggie. She would have felt weird about checking him out as she was if she hadn’t seen his eyes trail down what was visible of her body behind the counter before snapping back up to her face as he realised what he’d been doing.

Suddenly Peaseblossom was back, a pile of books clutched to her (flat) chest. “Look, they have lots of them. You’re really a writer.” Betty thought that providing an author for a bookshop owner was a little on the nose for Build-a-Man but she could roll with it. 

“Yeah, well, that’s what I said.” he replied, looking back at Betty with resignation in his mesmerising eyes.

“Come on, there’s a little sofa over there. You can tell me all about where you get your ideas.” He really couldn’t conceal his sigh as he hunched his shoulders and trudged behind her to the rear of the shop.

Ten minutes later Betty was re-shelving in the travel section when she heard a low voice rumbling from the next aisle. She pulled out a heavy volume about exploring Tibet in a hot air balloon and through the shelves saw Peaseblossom’s young man with his forehead pressed to the shelf and a cellphone to his ear. “Veronica, you condemned me to this circle of hell. You have to get me out of it. Please Ronnie… No, she’s not “fun”; she’s bubbly. She’s ebullient. She’s a manic pixie dream girl of the absolute worst kind. There is nothing I hate more than whimsy and I am drowning in whimsy here. I don’t care what you’re doing. Think of something. Oh God will it never end?” He ended the call and stared hopelessly down at his phone as if a genie might appear to help him.

Betty sidled to the end of the row and peeked round the shelf, catching his eye. “Date not going so well?”

“You heard that?” He was slightly flushed with embarrassment now.

“Sorry, I was just there in travel so…” she didn’t want him to think she was an eavesdropping creep and get Joe Goldberg vibes from her.

“Well, yeah. Of a dating history that’s pretty much all lows this is the Marianas Trench.”

“You’re a writer?”

“Yes, I should thank the owner, you’ve got all my titles. Bad news that they’re all in stock I suppose.”

“Have I read any of them?” Betty could have kicked herself. How was he supposed to know what she’d read?

“Forsythe Jones is the name the publishers insist on putting on the covers but I go by Jughead.” He held out an elegant hand, long fingers with prominent knuckles and she shook it politely while feeling weirdly aroused by the contact.

“Oh, I have actually read one. Sorry I don’t remember the title. The one where the kid gets murdered by his classmates in the woods. It was pretty terrifying. I liked it a lot.”

“Oh yeah. “Cadaver Sniffing Dog.” Well thanks for reading.” He offered her another one of those amazing smiles and her knees felt shaky. “I guess I’d better get back to being a reluctant character in Garden State.”

“Why are you going out with her if…?” She didn’t want to say, if you can’t stand her, but he obviously couldn’t stand her. What he needed was a blonde with a bookshop and the most devastating crush on him. 

“My friend Veronica thinks that I’m lonely. I’m not. I’m just alone because I’m no good at pretending to like people if I don’t; it’s so goddamn tiring. So she fixed up this date and said that if I had a bad time she’d never fix me up again which is a good deal but ohmigod **this** girl.”

“Do you care if she hates you?” Betty asked him with a sly look.

“No, I actively want her to hate me. She’ll be mad with Veronica and then I’ll never have to do this again. She’s not even into me really.”

“OK, I have a plan. Where is she?”

“I mentioned Thomas Pynchon and she’d never heard of him.” He looked pained. “She went to see if you have anything by him that she’d enjoy. You won’t have. She says she enjoyed “Fifty Shades.” He looked even more agonised.

“She was flirting with you, idiot. No-one says that to a man unless they’re being suggestive. Come with me.” Betty took his hand and led him through nineteenth century fiction. Peasebossom would have to trip daintily past to get back to the reading area. Betty couldn’t really believe that she was going to do this but, at the very least, she’d have an anecdote that would shut Archie up for the foreseeable future. She heard a jangle of silver bracelets that heralded the approach of the fairy and, turning to her conspirator, she whispered, “Trust me.” and leaned back against Thackeray through Trollope, pulling his face down to hers and kissing him hard. He responded with enthusiasm, a hand snaking behind her head, lips opening to deepen the kiss, teeth running lightly over her bottom lip until she let out an involuntary moan. It was, like the smile, stupendous, staggering, stunning, shattering, stupefying. Her tongue was making independent life choices as it stroked along his lip and then, encountering his tongue just fused to it, stroking and welcoming. Her heart was thudding like she’d just finished a run by sprinting up the stairs to the apartment, her blood was rushing in her ears, deep in her belly there was twisting and squeezing. She thought it might be her ovaries whispering “my precious.” And here, picking up her cue perfectly, was Peaseblossom.

“You total creep! You were alone for three minutes and you’re making out with some skanky bookshop ho. I can’t believe Veronica said you were a good guy. Well you’re not a good guy. You’re a boring, cranky weirdo and I hate your hat. Don’t call me. Ever!” and she was gone, the bell over the door clanging her goodbye. Neither of them watched her go.

“Wow, mission accomplished,” he grinned at her, obviously delighted but also shocked and breathless. “Look I’m sorry if I was out of line just then. I kind of forgot myself. It’s no excuse but I forgot you were pretending and got carried away. Oh wow, said every sexual predator ever. I’m sorry. You’re a great actress.”

Betty was staring at his lips. She was still tingling from head to toe from the kiss. “Not acting,” she murmured, “not acting at all.”

“Sorry? Didn’t catch that.” He craned forward to better hear her and her courage chose that moment to desert her and flee screaming back into its comfortable nest amongst the books and the nights at home alone.

“I just said you’re welcome. Glad I could help. You know, she was right though?”

“About what,” he asked, raising an eyebrow as if to say that he doubted she’d ever been right about anything.

“It would increase the value if you signed a few of the books.”

He grinned and pulled a rather chewed ballpoint from his shirt pocket and waggled it at her. “Glad to support an independent bookshop in its battle against the corporate monoliths.”

“So will your friend stop setting you up now?” she asked as she gathered the books for signing.

“No, she seems to think that dating is some sort of moral obligation, incumbent upon any single man in the metro area.”

“I know right? My roommate is always nagging me about “putting myself out there” as he terms it. It’s like he’s Mrs Bennett and thinks that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single person not riddled with social diseases, must be in want of a date.” 

He signed for a few minutes and then gave her the megawatt smile again which was just unfair because it made her lose command of her faculties when she had been trying to think of something witty and engaging to either make him ask her out for a coffee or take her roughly on the counter next to the cash register. Either would have been fine. But he smiled and she smiled back and then he was gone, into the early evening with a jangle of the bell and a “Thanks again.”

Betty sat back down at the counter and sank into quiet self reproach and introspection. She’d kissed him damn it. How could it have been too hard to say “Thank you. That was one of the most erotic experiences of my life. Please keep doing it for the next forty or fifty years?” Ten minutes passed as she stared at the page of her book without reading a word and then the bell jangled again and Build-a-Man Jones stood in the doorway like it wasn’t the most amazing and miraculous thing anyone had ever done. “I had an idea. I have a proposition for you. When do you get off work?”

“Now,” she said, walking over to the door and turning the sign. There had to be at least one perk of being the mortgagee on a struggling independent bookshop in the 2020s. “So, you said you had a proposition?”

“Right, yeah. So your roommate and my interfering friend give us both a hard time about dating, or not dating right? So my idea is that we date. Thoughts?”

“Are you saying that you want to date me so that your friend…Veronica?” He nodded. “So that Veronica stops nagging you?”

“No. I just want to date you. Because you’re beautiful and smart and snarky and you run a bookshop and, well, lots of reasons.” He’d self censored just in time but she’d seen him glance at her chest and she couldn’t stop her lips curling upwards. ”What I’m trying to provide is some incentive for you to date me.” He was regarding her seriously and intently. Betty boggled that he could be this oblivious of how attractive he was.

“I agree to your proposition. But you ought to know that I’m not doing it because of Archie. I’m agreeing because I think you’re really hot and I liked kissing you.” He stared at her, dumbstruck. 

“We’ll I think you might be having a stroke or something if you think that, but I’m not going to dissuade you. Great. How does one do this?” He actually was clueless so she leaned back against the counter and put her hand on the back of his neck. 

“You already know,” she murmured as he leaned in.


End file.
